


the ghost in the engine room

by cirque



Series: The Ghost in the Engine Room [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Ghosts, IN SPACE!, POV Child, post-natal depression, space gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25209376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: She hadn't always been a ghost.
Relationships: Madwoman in the Attic & Her Son Who Just Wants Revenge On Whoever Put Her In the Attic
Series: The Ghost in the Engine Room [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1843486
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	the ghost in the engine room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badritual](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/gifts).



There was a ghost in the engine room. Everyone knew it; the ship was  _ old _ , and it was bound to be haunted. There were older ships in the fleet, of course, and they had their own ghosts, but this one belonged to Halen. This ghost was his friend. This ghost was his mother.

She hadn’t always been a ghost. Once she had been beautiful, and deadly with a gun, and quick-witted like a galley rat. She’d told him the stories plenty of times, and he could even recite a few himself. She had been a captain with SkyCorp, a decorated soldier who had fought at the Battle of Jupiter 2, a young woman with dreams in her head and tears in her eyes. She had laughed, and loved, and been astonishingly brave, but then she had broken.

When Halen was born she was sick, and the sickness festered in her like dust in a machine. It grew with the passing weeks, leaving her cold, pale, lifeless and joyless. She became a ghost, or as good as, a living-dead thing, a shadow.

Father locked her up in the disused auxiliary engine room, giving her a corner of her own. Everyone thought her to be dead. As long as she kept out of the way, Father did not much care what she did, and what she did was  _ seethe _ . The sickness grew, but so did Halen, and eventually he found her there between the dusty pipes as thick as his torso: his mother, just a sad woman, a barely-there glimmer of life. That was enough, he knew. He could bring her back. He could set her free.

* * *

“Mother,” he said, into the gloom. There was water dripping somewhere--they needed to call the engineers, but hardly no one was allowed to come here except on Father’s orders. Not even Halen, he thought with dim guilt. 

“Yes?” Her voice was quiet, as befit a ghost. She was weaving plarn between her fingers by the light of Halen’s torch. It would grow, she had told him, into a blanket, but he could not see the shape yet. It looked formless to him, just a blob of plastic swishing between his mother’s thin hands. She had magic, he thought, in her body, in her pale blue eyes and her secret smile.

“Tell me again why Father locked you in here?”

She  _ tsked _ . “Halen,” she reprimanded, “You’ve heard that story countless times. It makes me sad to tell it, you know that.”

He knew, but he hungered for it anyway. Such was the way of the privileged children among the fleet, and none came more privileged than Halen, the Marshal’s son. He stuck out his lip; a sure way to get what he wanted.

“Just the bit about the priest?”

“No,” she shook her head, and her stringy hair tumbled. “ _ You _ tell it, since you know it so well.”

“I forget,” he lied. He knew boys weren’t supposed to lie to their mothers, but she was a ghost after all. Maybe the rules were different.

She finished a row of her knitting, and turned it back on itself so that she could begin the next. She was swift and steady, and Halen’s eyes crossed as he watched her work. It hurt his head to stare at her too long.

Mother sighed. “Oh, why don’t you tell me a story instead? Tell me what the stars look like lately. What sights did you see today? What news of the ship, what drama, what gossip?” She always wanted to know what was going on. It was boring, Halen felt.

He folded his arms, dismayed. “The stars look the same as always. Yellow. Small. Sometimes shooting, mostly not. You know what stars look like, they never change.” He never gave much thought to the passing stars, which blurred together in the wake of hyperspeed. 

“Ah,” she smiled, “The stars  _ always  _ change.”

He rolled his eyes. “Alright… We’re travelling through the Exmit Nebula, so Father says. They’re calling it a ‘star nursery’ because we can see a lot of young stars out the window. They’re pretty… Kind of orangy. They all look the same to me, though. We should be out of it in a few days and then we’re headed to the…” he racked his brain. “The Kepl Galaxy, where there are at least fifteen planets. There’s some disagreement about the sixteenth. Father hopes we can settle on one, do some mining, but his men are not so sure. Something about the atmosphere, I don’t know…” Father had mentioned that perhaps they would stay awhile, if the planets were agreeable.

“Typical Wrent,” she shook her head again. “Never listens to the scientists.” He liked it when she called his father by his last name. It reminded him that she was a soldier, once.

“As for gossip,” Halen went on, “Lady Kem had her baby, but it’s the wrong skin color. Everyone says Lady Kem had an affair, what’s an affair?”

“It means she’s keeping secrets.”

Halen nodded. Lady Kem was well known for secrets. She traded in them, like gold coins of old. She thought they afforded her a certain type of luxury, and people sure paid for them. Halen did not much understand politics, but he knew Lady Kem was a force of nature. Still, the fleet had been wrecked by the revelation of her white-skinned daughter; Lady Kem and her husband were dark where the baby was fair.

“Well that’s going on. And one of the scout ships reported a bolide made of diamonds, and people can’t decide what to do about that. They’re having a big argument.”

“Diamonds, eh?” Her eyes lit up. She looked beautiful like that.

“I’ll bring you a diamond, Mother.” Anything to keep her smiling.

“My clever boy,” she tickled him on his ribs and he giggled, a high-pitched sound that echoed against the metal walls of the hull. “You’d better go before your father notices you’re not in your quarters. I want you to finish your schoolwork, alright?”

Halen didn’t want to finish his schoolwork, and let his face show it.

* * *

His father didn’t know about Halen seeing his mother. As far as Father was concerned, Mother was dead. A ghost for true. Halen kept it secret, like one of Lady Kem’s schemes, a physical thing hidden behind his heart.

Their quarters were lit by candles, artificial things forced to look like real flame. There was a science to it, Halen knew, but he did not understand the hows and the whys. To him it was magic, and he loved to watch them flicker as his father puttered about barefoot, smoking yet another cigarette. The room was otherwise dark, as befit an ancient ship.

There was creaking in the walls, and Halen had to project his voice so that Father could hear him. “Father,” he said, uneasy. “Tell me again how my mother died.”

Father looked at him from across the room. He was growing a beard, and Halen rather thought it was a scruffy-looking thing. Halen would not grow a beard of his own, he had decided.

“I’ve told you a hundred times, what is it with you and stories?”

Mother said stories were a way to understand ourselves. She said they had a magic of their own, like the tales of the constellations on Old Earth. They said they were gods, or angels. It was all stories in the end: stars, planets, an exodus of soldiers.

“I dunno,” he shrugged. “Just tell me, please.”

“She died when you were born, is that what you want to hear?”

It wasn’t, and Father knew it. “Tell me about how she faded away.”

Father stopped pacing and took a long drag of his cigarette. “Post-natal depression is very common,” he said, “Especially among women who don’t get regular sunlight.”

“The sun makes people ghosts?”

“No, Halen. The sun contributes to production of serotonin. And what is serotonin?”

“The antidepressant hormone,” he parroted. Mr Loxley would be proud.

“Precisely. Your mother was already susceptible to depression. The hormones surrounding your birth only exacerbated the matter.”

“She died because of me?”

Father looked at him. This moment was crucial. Halen’s insides were twisting up. Was he really to blame for his mother’s exile?

“Not because of you, no. She was fading away before your birth, truth be told. But you know all of this. Why drag it all up?”

Halen was ten. His mother said when you grew up you had to reconsider things. You had to learn what life meant. “I just wondered…” he said, morose.

“It does no good to dwell on the past,” his father said. “If we did, we’d fade away too, right?”

Halen shrugged. He didn’t much relish the thought of joining his mother permanently in the engine room. He loved freedom too much. He loved running down abandoned hallways, hearing the static hum of old electrics, peering out the moon-shaped windows at the blurry waves the FTL drive made in the black expanse of space. He loved the way people nodded at him as he passed, not the Marshal’s son but just another kid, just Halen, poor motherless Halen. 

“Don’t you want to talk about current events? Aren’t you interested in the Kepl galaxy?”

Halen was most emphatically not, but he nodded anyway. He knew what his father wanted to hear. “Are we going to land on one of the planets?” He’d only been on one planet in his entire life, when he was little and could barely remember, some long-forgotten world several galaxies ago. He remembered the heavy feel of its gravity, and the taste of berries, fresh berries, berries that actually grew on a plant in the actual ground and tasted of sunlight.

“Perhaps,” said his father, “If they have the correct atmosphere. We need the right air composition, don’t we? But several of the planets are looking promising. There’s one that is ninety percent water, but it has these little islands. Tropical islands. A beach, Halen, how would you feel about that?”

Halen had read about beaches. They had them on Old Earth. They did not interest him. “S’alright, I suppose.”

“Well,” his father narrowly avoided rolling his eyes. “I for one would love to walk on the beach. Looks like I’ll be going alone.”

Halen thought suddenly of aliens. Aliens would be cool. “Are there things living on the planets?”

His father shrugged. “We aren’t sure. Yet. We’ll do a lifeform scan when we enter the galaxy, later this week. I certainly hope not. A war would be so unfortunate.”

The talk of war reminded him of his mother. “Tell me another story. Tell me about Mother’s war days. Tell me about Orion’s necklace.” Back in the Milky Way, in the early days of the exodus, mother had waged war among the stars against the Invaders. It was one of his favorite stories.

“Belt, Halen. Orion’s belt.”

“See? If you told me again, I might remember.”

His father resumed his pacing. “I’m not telling you bedtime stories. You’re far too old for that.”

Halen tried not to pout, but he evidently did not succeed because his father rolled his eyes.

“Go to bed, Halen,” he said, and Halen’s heart felt heavy, and wrong, and he did not disobey. 

* * *

Lady Kem’s quarters were divine. She had stars inlaid in her ceiling, and thick pink carpeting, and incense burning everywhere. She was one of those women who cared about her image. She wasn’t a soldier, or a cleaner, or an engineer, or anything like that. She was a courtesan, which meant nothing to Halen, but he went to visit her baby all the same.

The child was indeed white, pale skinned and red-haired, like Halen himself. He smiled at the little thing, just a pinkish blob with alien eyes. His father lifted the infant up and cradled her. Halen tried to imagine Father doing that to him, but it must have been forever ago.

Lady Kem reclined on her cushions, watching them coddle her child. She had dark skin and darker hair, and she wore a shiny yellow gown that gave Halen a headache. The incense was burning lemon and lime, scents Halen knew from science lessons in the aquaponics lab.

“She’s a pretty little thing,” his father said, rocking the bundle of blankets somewhat.

Halen was bored. Sure, the baby was cute, but she wasn’t much good for playing with. Halen didn’t know why Lady Kem had invited them there and he was curious.

“What shall we name her?” Father asked him, and Halen cocked his head. Why should he care what Lady Kem named her offspring? Lady Kem had two other children besides, and she had never thought to consult them before.

“I dunno,” Halen said, looking into the child’s face. She had blue eyes, but he knew that most babies did. They set in their color later in life, which reminded Halen of chameleons from Old Earth.

“You pick for her, Halen,” Lady Kem said in her drawling voice.

Halen didn’t know many names. He thought of his mother, how unfair her lot was in life. He thought of her name, so pretty, too pretty to languish in the engine room, surely pretty enough to gift to this child. “Emily,” he said, and all the smiles died.

Lady Kem recovered first. “That’s a lovely name Halen, but…”

Halen’s eyes were on his father. He saw the flicker of doubt, and barely-contained fury, and embarrassment, and a thousand other emotions that came with locking your wife up where no one would find her. Halen felt proud, somewhat, that he had caused this.

“It’s my mother’s name,” he said, then corrected himself: “It  _ was _ .”

Father coughed to cover the look of utter dismay that covered his face. “Are you sure? Perhaps you’d like to save that for a daughter of your own?”

Halen frowned. He looked at baby Emily and knew it was her name, the way he knew his mother thought of him in the dead of night. He wanted his father to suffer the discomfort of being reminded about her. “No. She’s Emily.”

Emily began to fuss, and his father cooed at her, working his thumb between her flexing fingers. Emily gripped on tight, and Halen’s father smiled as though she were the greatest gift he’d ever received. His father had never looked at  _ him  _ like that. Halen felt put out, and bored of babies.

Lady Kem noticed, of course. “Would you like to hold her, Halen?”

Halen didn’t, but his father immediately passed her on. Halen’s arms felt numb and stiff as he tried to cradle her properly. Emily was heavy, he noted, heavier than he had thought a baby could be. She was only two days old, still breakable, and he looked down into her pale face, so like his own. He had never seen a face like that before, except in the mirror.

“What do you think?” asked Lady Kem.

“She’s… alright.” He didn’t know why Lady Kem cared what he thought of her baby. If he was being honest, Halen was underwhelmed. He had expected the baby to do more, not just sleep and sneeze and cry a little. He wanted to go and see his mother, and have her tell him stories. He wondered, would Emily like to hear the stories? Perhaps, when she was bigger, he could take her to meet his mother. That would please Mother, he thought, to meet her namesake.

“Can I go?” Halen asked his father. Lady Kem finally got off her cushions and took the baby from him, jiggling her slightly. Halen regarded her critically. He wondered if someone was going to lock  _ her  _ in the engine room, if Emily would grow up with questions and no mother. He didn’t know what postnatal depression looked like, but Lady Kem didn’t look anything like a ghost. She looked vibrant,  _ real _ , her dark skin glowing gold under her cosmetics. She smiled down at Emily as though everything was perfect, and maybe it was. Halen doubted he would ever understand.

“Can I go?” he asked again.

His father frowned again. “Yes. Fine. Go on. Do whatever it is that you do. But remember, Mr Loxley wants you in the MedBay this afternoon.”

Halen had fat chance of forgetting that; Mr Loxley kept sending him reminders to his smartwatch. Halen thought a reminder every half-hour was overkill, but then Mr Loxley was like that.

“Tell Gray I said ‘hello’, will you?” said Lady Kem.

Halen frowned at hearing his teacher’s first name, but he nodded. He cast one last look back to Emily, nestled in her mother’s arms as his father leaned in, smiling. Halen did not understand babies, but they sure were boring. All she was doing was sleeping, but they were looking at her like she picked the stars out the sky. There was something indescribable in their eyes, something ancient. 

* * *

Mother cried when he told her. He knew depression made you sad, made you slaven to misery at odd moments, but he had not expected her to cry when he told her about Emily. Babies were good news, weren’t they?

“I named her for you mother,” he said, in his best reassuring voice.

“That’s not why I’m crying,” she managed. She wiped at her tears, silvery little things that clung to her fingertips.

“Then why?”

She shook her head. Her hair was knotted and her eyes were ringed red. She looked broken, like the photographs of people on Old Earth before the exodus, during the war with the Invaders. She looked like a  _ victim, _ and Halen did not like that.

“Do you want to be free, mother?”

She drew in a steady breath. “I don’t know how I’d go about adjusting to living in the open again. This room has become my cage, and sometimes we love our cages.”

“I’ll help you, I promise.”

“That’s sweet of you.”

“I don’t know how Father can go on pretending you’re dead.”

“I expect it’s very easy for him. I’m sure he’s happy that I’m not in the way.”

“I hate him for what he’s done to you.”

She hissed. “Don’t hate him. He’s your father. He had his reasons.”

“But why?” It was a question that had plagued Halen for months, ever since he had first found his mother. He had followed the ghost stories to the old abandoned parts of the ship, to the auxiliary engine room and found her there, mangled and lost. She had been muttering about demons when he came across her. He had hated his father ever since.

“Your father is a statesman, first and foremost. He cares about image, have you noticed? He cares what people think of him, whose support he has, how many people look up to him. That’s why he gets on so well with that damned Lady Kem. The two of them, schemers. Well, a madwoman doesn’t fit in with his schemes, understand? I was crazy,” she said, as though it were simple, though Halen felt it was anything but.

“So what if you’re crazy?” he asked. “So what?”

His mother was different, yes, she had nightmares from her war days, she cried at random moments, she had that horrid look in her eyes that reminded Halen of watching movies of the final days on Old Earth. Despair, dread, a sickness in the brain. But so what? So did many soldiers in the fleet, and nobody locked them up.

“Do you want to be free?” he asked again.

She bit her lip. She was crying still. “No,” she said, in a tiny whisper. “I’m not ready--not yet. Please, don’t push me.” She got up off the floor and shuffled over to her little sleeping area. There was a cot there, and a little table with her solitary lamp. Halen brought her batteries every now and then; he had marvelled that they still _had_ old style batteries; everything was usually solar powered. The rug was curling up at the edges. Everything was old here, cobbled together on Halen’s many scavenging trips.

“I won’t push you, mother.” he assured her.

“When your father comes and brings me food, I think of escaping. Ten years it’s been. Ten fucking years. I think of running away, but where would I go? I don’t know this ship, and I have no place here. To all the soldiers, I’m dead. To your father, I’m dead. I might as well be dead.” She pulled at her stringy hair. He hoped she wasn’t having one of her hallucinations. They usually came on when she was especially stressed. This was all his fault.

“But Mother,” he said, “If you escaped, you could see a doctor. They might be able to help you.” He thought of the army of doctors in the MedBay. They could cure anything, he’d seen it with his own eyes. They had a pill for almost everything, and a cream for everything else. Once Halen had chipped a tooth off when he fell, and they built him a new one out of polymer and gold before the hour was up. If anyone could help her, they could.

“You’re still such a little boy,” she told him, though he thought this was unfair. “You don’t know, Halen, the energy it takes just to live in this place. It’s sucking my soul dry. Every day the same; every day a nightmare, the  _ same  _ nightmare, and it never ends.”

It sounded terrible. Halen got a lump in his throat thinking about it. 

* * *

He often hung around the bridge. As the Marshal’s son he went unreprimanded, and he was free to do what he wished, within reason. He liked the bridge for its atmosphere, and he liked to be the first to know things. He hated the thought of his father informing him as an afterthought.

Years ago, two hundred at least, this ship had been new. Before the exodus, when building space-faring ships was just humanity’s pipe dream, someone had kitted the bridge out with all the best twenty-fourth century equipment. There were touch screens and radiation covers and gel sensors. There was a top-rate communications system with a built in translator. There were lights hanging from the ceiling, which swung in time to the ship’s movement, an impractical sickening design. And there was a chair, swivel and all, which Halen loved to occupy.

“Move,” said his father, and Halen shuffled away, but not too far. He kept his eyes on the main screen.

“What’s happening Father?”

“What’s happening is you’re going back to our quarters.”

Halen did not move. He stuck out his lip. “I want to see.”

Lady Kem was there too, her infant strapped to her chest. She was  _ always _ there lately, it seemed. She approached them now with her hands spread. “Come here, Halen. We can watch together.”

For a moment his father glared at her, and Halen readied himself for a shouting match, but then he seemed to mellow, sink inwards, and he permitted Halen to stand beside Lady Kem. She took his hand, which Halen felt was unnecessary. She pulled him close. He was eye-to-eye with the baby, and he poked her nose experimentally.

“We’re coming up on the third planet,” his father was saying. “Designated: Gamma. We’re breaking the atmosphere any second now.”

The planet loomed beyond the great window. True to father’s word, it was mostly ocean blue. It looked like a big puddle and Halen crossed his eyes as they got closer and closer. There was some turbulence as they entered the atmosphere and everyone stumbled. Baby Emily began to cry and Halen waited for his father to yell at her for distracting him, but he never did.

They hovered in mid air. Everything was blue: the sky, the planet, the dark blue of oblivion. 

“Take us down onto the nearest patch of land.” Father insisted, and the crew scrambled to obey him.

Halen looked up at Lady Kem. She didn’t look excited, she looked rather bored with the proceedings. Halen was excited, he could feel it bubbling in his stomach. 

“Nitrogen levels seventy per cent, oxygen at twenty-nine.” said one of the crew. Everyone was focused on their screens; they were missing the beauty of what was below them. Halen could not help his gasp.

“Emily look,” he said, as they crested the horizon. One of the islands was growing bigger and bigger. Halen could see dark green grass, real green, not the artificial stuff they had in the aquaponics lab. He could see hills and valleys, and bright white sand, and there in the distance: something that could only be a volcano, belching radiation lines. He had only ever seen photographs.

The landing was a little rough, and Halen got tossed away from Lady Kem. He recovered and moved to stand beside his father, leaning on the arms of the chair.

“Are there aliens?” he asked conspiratorially. His father ignored him.

“Alpha team, on me,” he said instead, and a dozen-or-so armed soldiers marched up to him in their green-brown uniforms. “I want a full scan of the island. I want drones over every inch of this place. I want the sea water analysing and I want a lifeform scan in every nook and cranny.”

His soldiers marched off with their orders, leaving a bare crew. 

“Halen,” his father called. “When they’re done, would you like to step out on solid ground?”

Halen was nervous. “Are we staying here?”

“For a little while, yes. Emily will take her first steps here, at least. Do you want to go out?”

He thought of his mother, locked away like a shameful lie. She would want him to be happy, wouldn’t she? It wasn’t abandoning her. He was only going out for a walk. It would be fine. 

He smiled up at his father. “Yes,” he said, and felt as if he heard the ghost in the engine room howl.

**Author's Note:**

> There **will** be more of this, but I have... a lot of things I need to write.


End file.
